Clayton Eshleman was born Ira Clayton Eshleman Jr. on June 1, 1935, in Indianapolis,
Indiana. He is the only child of Gladys and Clayton Eshleman, both Presbyterians,
and from midwestern backgrounds (Eshleman himself believes that "Eshleman"
is based on "ash" as in "ash tree," and that he is a wee bud on the world
tree, Yggdrasill). He was brought up to be a racist, and to identify only
with people who looked like him (he was, for example, forbidden to play with
children whose mothers wore slacks away from home). His mother started him
on piano lessons when he was 6, and at about the same time he discovered imagination
via comic strips and books. He began to listen to bebop as a teenager (Bud
Powell especially), and hang out in Indianapolis blues clubs. After graduating
from Shortridge High School in 1953 (where he ran track, wrestled, and played
right end on the football team), he entered Indiana University, as a music
major and as a pledge to the Phi Delta Theta fraternity. The summer of 1954
he spent in Los Angeles, parking cars for a living, and hanging out in jazz
clubs at night (he also studied jazz piano briefly with Marty Paitch and Richie
Powell). Upon returning to Indiana University that fall, he dropped out of
music school and, at his father's urging, entered Business School. He does
not recall much of the following two years. In 1956 he was thrown out of school
for a combination of poor grades and excessive campus parking tickets, at
which time he moved out of the fraternity into a series of rooms and shared
apartments in Bloomington, and returned to school in 1957 as a Philosophy
Major. He also took some creative writing workshops and American poetry courses,
and for the first time in his life, something really took hold: poetry.

At the same time that he was discovering poetry, his friends Jack and Ruth
Hirschman were introducing him to world poetry via translations of such writers
as Federico Garcia Lorca, Vladimir Mayakofsky, Rainer Maria Rilke,
and St.-John Perse. He also came across translations of the poetry
of Pablo Neruda and Cesar Vallejo and began to teach himself Spanish, mainly
to learn what these two poets were really writing. The summers of 1958 and
1959 were spent in Mexico, where he started to translate Neruda himself. The
Neruda Residencias were the first poems that really captivated
him. While a graduate student at Indiana University he also met Mary Ellen
Solt who introduced him to William Carlos Williams and the Black Mountain
poets. Via the Hirschmans he met Robert Kelly, Jerry Rothenberg, and Paul
Blackburn. He married Barbara Novak, from Logansport, in the spring of 1961
and accepted an instructorship with the University of Maryland in their Far-Eastern
Division (Japan, Taiwan, Korea) teaching literature and composition to armed
forces personnel. By the fall of 1961 he and Barbara were living in Musashi-Koganei,
a Tokyo suburb.

In the fall of 1961, Gary Snyder visited on his way to meet Allen Ginsberg
in India and suggested the Eshlemans would be happier living in Kyoto, teaching
English as a Second Language. They moved there in the spring of 1962 and remained
in Kyoto until the fall of 1964. While in Kyoto, Eshleman began his apprenticeship
to poetry: a translation of the 110 poems that Vallejo wrote in Paris between
1923 and 1938. He also read all of Blake, and Joseph Campbell's The Masks
of God tetralogy. He became good friends with Snyder, Cid Corman and
the lithographer Will Petersen, all of whom were living in Kyoto at this time.
From Corman he learned a good deal about translation and literary magazine
editing.

Barbara and Clayton returned to the States, and moved back to Bloomington,
where he worked on an anthology of Latin American poetry assigned by the O.A.S.
in Washington (which he completed but has never been published) while Barbara
worked in the university campus bookstore. In the spring of 1965, Eshleman
took L.S.D., for the first of six times with Daphne Marlatt. He also
decided to go to Lima, Peru, to attempt to see Vallejo's worksheets for the
Paris poems, then in the hands of his French widow, Georgette. With Barbara
several months pregnant, the couple made the move in August, finding a small
apartment in the Miraflores section of Lima. A complicated 9 months ensued:
Eshleman was offered the chance to start a bilingual literary magazine by
the Peruvian North American Institute, which he called Quena, but
the magazine first issue of some 300 pages was suppressed by the Institute
because it supposedly contained political material; Barbara gave birth to
Matthew Craig Eshleman in February 1966 and soon after nearly bled to death;
Eshleman was denied access to the Vallejo worksheets by Georgette; he
also spent a lot of time wandering the slum areas of Lima and claims that
the Peruvian experience made him political for the first time in his life.

Once back in the States in the spring of 1966, they moved to NYC and
separated shortly. Clayton moved into a basement room condemned for human
habitation on Bank Street, and Barbara and the baby moved to an apartment
at 18th Street and 2nd Avenue. Both soon had jobs at the American Language
Institute at New York University, where Clayton taught for two years. In 1967
he took over Joanne Kyger's loft at 36 Greene Street, and founded the literary
review, Caterpillar, which he edited on a quarterly basis until moving
to southern California in 1970 as part of the original faculty in the School
of Critical Studies at the California Institute of the Arts. Before leaving
for California, he met Caryl Reiter (New Year's eve, 1968), and she accompanied
him to Sherman Oaks, in the San Fernando Valley where the couple lived until
the fall of 1973, when they moved to Paris for a year. Caterpillar magazine
ended in the spring of 1973, with the 20th issue.

While living in Paris in Montmartre, Caryl began to work with Clayton in
the editing of his poetry, an activity that has continued to this day. The
Eshlemans also met the Spanish translator Helen Lane who convinced them
that they should see the French Dordogne before returning to the States. In
the spring of 1974, they rented a furnished apartment in the same farm complex
with Lane, and soon after moving there discovered the painted and engraved
Ice Age caves of that region. Eshleman also discovered that all the books
on cave art had been written by archeologists and decided to undertake an
open-ended investigation of what he soon came to call "Upper Paleolithic Imaginaton
& the Construction of the Underworld." Caryl and Clayton returned
to Los Angeles in the fall of 1974 and after spending several months with
his Black Sparrow Press publishers, John and Barbara Martin in west
Los Angeles they found a duplex nearby where they remained, with
the exception of several trips back to the French caves, until summer
1986. While in Los Angeles, the poet became unhappy with his 1968 Grove Press
edition of Vallejo translations and teaming up with Jose Rubia Barcia, a Spaniard
teaching at U.C.L.A., the two cotranslated all of this poetry along with Vallejo's
Spanish Civil War poems. In 1982 the Eshlemans took a small
group to the caves, an activity which has continued off and on until the present
(in 2000 the Ringling School of Art and Design, Sarasota, became the tour's
official sponsor).

After Eshleman was offered a Professorship in the Eastern Michigan University
English Department the couple bought a house in Ypsilanti, 6 miles
east of Ann Arbor, where they continue to live. At EMU Eshleman taught Introduction
to Literature: Poetry, as well as numerous poetry workshops. The Eshlemans
continue to return to France whenever possible, and in the late 1990s, Clayton
finished his cave investigation as the book, Juniper Fuse.

Over the past decade, five collections of his translations, five collections
of his poetry, and two collections of essays have been published. Over the
years he has published his writing and translations in over 500 literary magazines
and newspapers, and given readings of his work at over 200 universities. He
is now Professor Emeritus at EMU. In 2004 Black Sparrow Press will bring out
a new collection of poetry, My Devotion, and Soft Skull will bring
out a revised and expanded version of his 1988 selected translations, Conductors
of the Pit. In October 2007, Black Widow Press brought out a new collection
of CE's prose, interviews, prose poems, and notes, called Archaic Design.
In the fall of 2008, Black Widow will publish a 600 page "Eshleman Reader,"
a selection from forty years of his poetry, prose, and translations, to be
called The Grindstone of Rapport.